


In Space, No One Can . . .

by NeoVenus22



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-11
Updated: 2010-03-11
Packaged: 2017-10-07 21:49:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeoVenus22/pseuds/NeoVenus22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was supposed to be a simple recon mission. But things went wrong, things always went wrong, and Sam found herself trapped on a broken cargo ship with Rodney McKay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Space, No One Can . . .

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: None. Takes place sometime after 'Flesh and Blood'.

"I think we're dead," McKay muttered, shifting in his seat and wincing as a result. He pressed a hand tentatively to his ribs, prodding as if it were any other experiment.

"We're not dead," Sam assured him. "If we were, it wouldn't hurt so much."

McKay groaned in what she presumed was agreement. "Besides, if we were dead," he said, as though it was his idea they weren't all along, "we'd be Ascended by now."

"What makes you think we'd be Ascended?" she said. She was only half-paying attention, poking at the controls to see if they had any systems online at all.

"Well, come on. Look at us. You and I are the two smartest people on the planet. They're going to take one look at us, and then probably go back in time to make sure they never invited Dr. Jackson in the first place."

Even though Daniel was one of her closest friends, closer than family (and that aside, she had stronger ties of loyalty to him than to McKay any day of the week), Sam laughed. Maybe she was getting delusional. The chuckle quickly turned into a pained wheeze, and something in her side ached horribly. Around her, the stolen Tel'tak hummed and glowed a little, then died, the equivalent of a car engine turning over. They were stranded.

"How screwed are we?" McKay asked.

"We could do with a little optimism right now, McKay," she chastised, but realized how futile it was, given the circumstances. "All right, we're reasonably screwed. We have life support, but the engines are dead, so we're suspended. We could do with a distress beacon, but to get enough power, we'd have to shut off the cloak."

"Yes, yes, and then just anyone can swing on by, see a deadweight Goa'uld cargo ship, and open fire."

"We do run that risk. We're in Lucian Alliance territory, which makes us fair game for a raiding party, especially if we're drawing attention to ourselves with a distress beacon."

"Can we escape?"

"There are rings, but we're too far out to lock onto any other set of rings, so we'd just float aimlessly in space. We should probably disable them, so no one else can ring in."

McKay nodded. "And shields? These things have shields, don't they? Shields and weapons?"

"The weapons aren't going to do us much good, unless the Alliance meets us head-on, with their eyes closed, and just hang out awhile for us to fire. We're sitting ducks, unless we divert the power from weapons to the shield."

"We're not disabling our weapons system," he said sharply.

"I'm not seeing any other options, McKay. What would you prefer we do, divert power from the life support? We can't fire on anyone. If we boost the shield, we stand a better chance of surviving an attack."

"Yes, until the shields eventually fail, in which case we're just sitting here with targets painted on our asses!"

"The engines are fried, we have to make do with what we can, stay alive as long as possible until we're found. That means life support, shields, and a beacon."

"Could you please explain to me why you always choose the most reckless, irresponsible option?" he asked. "Not that I don't find it very intriguing, it's just that this time, I'm the one under threat of painful, unpleasant death."

"We don't know the Lucian Alliance will find us first, or that they'll kill us for the trouble," she said. "The _Odyssey_ does know our position from the last contact we had, and I don't believe we've veered that far off course."

McKay flipped his hand at her in annoyance. "Fine, go reroute the power. But just the cloak; keep our weapons online."

"What?" She batted her eyes at him mockingly. "You're going to trust dumb little me with so huge a task? All those crystals! I might get... confused."

"Yes, yes, very funny," said McKay. "For your information, I'm not convinced I can get up."

"You're not injured that badly," she said, rising and taking a test step. Nothing crunched or snapped, and she felt solid overall. Sore, but solid. The Tel'tak didn't have the sort of inertial dampeners either of them were used to, and they'd gotten banged up navigating through the asteroid belt, but the minor collisions would have left them bruised at best, and she felt certain McKay was exaggerating.

"C'mon," she said, in a low and encouraging tone, "I can't do this without you." It was a lie, and one she knew she'd come to regret, but she wanted him moving. Immobility led to panic, and a panicked Rodney McKay was something she wanted to deal with even less than a deadweight cargo ship in the territory of heavily possessive space pirates.

His eyes lit up at her vague praise, and he said, "Well," which she translated to mean, _Well, I suppose I could deign to help the poor blond bimbo with such a trivial problem that is obviously far outside her realm of capability_, and he struggled to his feet. Sam offered her arm out of kindness, and he had the decency to take it without complaint or offense. He leaned on it more heavily than she was expecting, and she noted with mild horror his shirt was torn in the middle of a large, dark stain. Sam hadn't realized the severity of his injuries. The console was ripped apart next to where McKay had been sitting, and he must have been hit with some shrapnel.

Once he was up, he was more mobile; after a few steps, he stopped relying heavily on Sam's assistance, though he didn't shrug off her steadying arm. They bantered for a few precious moments about the best way to get the job done, but at the end of it, a wiped-looking McKay sat back, and sighed that she might as well get it over with. Sam made quick work of the system, and returned to the front of the vessel to collect her med kit and double-check to see she hadn't accidentally re-wired the life support. Satisfied, she returned to McKay's side to give him a quick examination.

"While I always knew you'd get my shirt off eventually," he commented, leaning slightly away from her so she could see the wound better, "I wasn't expecting it to be under such dire circumstances."

What she wanted to say (what she almost said) was, _Shut up_. What she ended up saying, in a decidedly griping tone, was, "Count your blessings, McKay."

"Oh, yes, I'm sorry. Thank you, God, for this gaping hole in my side, while I float aimlessly in space to be shot like fish in a barrel."

"This is barely a scratch," she said, mopping away the blood and prodding the warm skin with care. It looked clean, and not too deep. "It probably won't even scar."

McKay squirmed away, the pain twisting his face more the result of embarrassment than the wound. "Your hands are cold."

Sam sighed, long and low and as loud as she could muster, though in the process she discovered that her chest was a little tight, and it culminated in a minor but undignified cough. "You just have to be contrary, don't you, McKay?" she said, opening her first aid.

McKay's eyes widened slightly at the sight of the black thread. "There is no way you're sewing me up, Martha Stewart," he said.

"Would you rather bleed to death?" she asked him calmly.

"You said it wasn't that bad!"

"McKay, I am about five seconds away from sewing your mouth shut."

She approached him threateningly, and he threw his hands up in surrender. "Okay. Okay okay okay okay okay. Okay. Just the hole is, is fine."

"This won't hurt if you stay still," she said, and stared at him calmly. McKay seemed to put a certain degree of trust in this gesture, in her, and closed his eyes obediently.

While Sam worked, McKay talked, endlessly and about nothing. Sam was almost grateful for the mindless chatter: it kept him distracted, which allowed her to work better, and he was actually entertaining. He had the same earnestness she found displayed in Daniel or Cameron, but Daniel rambled about alien cultures and Ancient texts, and Cameron had a tendency to discuss any and all missions at great length, regardless of whether or not he'd actually been on them. And no offense to either of her teammates, but they were things Sam had heard a thousand times before.

McKay's stories were filled with excruciating attention to detail in regards to the projects he'd undertaken to save the day, and Sam found it a refreshing change of pace. She suspected having an audience that understood him without needing simplified explanation was a great comfort to McKay, as well.

"So what now?" McKay asked, as Sam packed away her materials and discreetly used her pants to scrape away trickles of dried blood.

Occasionally, Sam fantasized about a mission where everything went perfectly, where no one got shot at, or zatted, or injured in anything form greater than a paper cut, and all of the technology remained in tact, nothing backfired, there were no space drugs, and Daniel didn't die yet again. She suspected it was one of those things where it sounded good in theory, but would turn out to be mildly disappointing. Sam liked to hold on to the ideal, however, pressed in the back of her mind, forever unattainable.

"We wait," Sam decided, largely because she was too tired at this point for much else. Harrowing escapes and emergency surgery (no matter how minor) had left her a little drained, and she wanted to rest for a few minutes so she'd be fresh when they inevitably ran into more trouble.

"Oh," said McKay. She wondered if he'd finally talked himself out. He sat there, back against the gilded wall, a series of uneven black stitches in his side, chest rising and falling with remarkably calm breaths.

"Do you want your shirt back?" she asked, but rather than pick it up from the floor, she settled down next to him to rest.

"Why, is my sex appeal too much for you to handle?" he said.

She ran through several options in her mind, before deciding there was no good response to his comment. McKay took her silence in stride, having moved on to examine his side. "Oh my God! Are you a blind rhesus monkey? Ronon could've done a better job than this, with a hacksaw and one of his dreads."

One of the many thoughts that entered her mind after an encounter with McKay was the consideration if he really was that obnoxious, a little bug of a man, or if he just had a subtle sadism to him. Maybe he rankled her on purpose. "I don't know who's going to shoot you first, the Lucian Alliance or me," she said.

"Very funny."

"Who says I was joking?" She drummed her fingers against her knee, but stopped when she could feel the bruise blossoming where she'd banged her leg against the console. "Are you hungry?" she asked instead. They'd only brought minor rations, which they should have saved, but she couldn't remember if she'd had breakfast or not, and the dull pang in her stomach was not the result of injury.

"I suppose," he said, and she rifled in one of her pockets to find a protein bar, which she split and gave half of to McKay. He was disconcerting her a little. The complaints were few and far between, and she got the impression he was only doing it for the sake of image. The 'never say die' aspect of his personality, the truly abhorrent ego that did manage to save people's asses from time to time, seemed to have taken a vacation. Sam believed waiting was their best and safest option at the moment, but it didn't mean she wasn't running through a variety of other scenarios in her head. She'd come to expect the same sort of behavior from McKay, but whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.

They sat in contemplative, companionable silence, chewing at their protein bars, before McKay piped up, "Sam, you and I, we—"

"Oh, no," she said, holding up her hand to cease his chatter. "We're not talking about this now."

"Would you prefer we wait for the next near-death experience?" he answered hotly. Sam huffed loudly in response, and as she got to her feet, creaking all the way, she dropped McKay's shirt back in his lap. She moved back towards the cockpit, because if they were going to wait for help —or death— they should at least see it coming. Behind her, she heard McKay shuffling and rustling and making more noise than was really necessary. "I'd just like to state for the record, Samantha, that we have a certain chemistry between us."

"If by 'chemistry,' you mean 'animosity,' then yes, there is a considerable amount of that."

"I find you attractive," he continued with ruthless courage.

"McKay."

"And I'm just saying we're in a position where these could be our last moments on Earth —well, 'Earth' is relative, all things considered— and—"

"McKay!" She turned around, so he could get the full brunt of her flashing eyes and calculated frown, and was moderately relieved to find he'd dressed again, the stain on his shirt pinpointing the location of his injury with impossible blackness. "It's not going to happen."

"Oh, come on! It's your fault we're in this mess, the least you can do is make it up to me!"

While she couldn't deny that the entire mission going south (or perhaps only southwest, depending on how soon the _Odyssey_ got there) was probably her fault in part, McKay's entire system of justice was so skewed she couldn't help but be amused. The giggle protruded from her sharply before she could stop it, then it progressed into a full-on laugh, one fueled more by gallows humor than anything else. It clenched her gut and made her lean against the pilot seat for support. Just before Sam's eyes squeezed shut under a fresh round of guffaws, she saw McKay gaping at her.

"Are you okay?" he said, crossing the tiny space in a step and half, and crowding her, placing steady hands on her skull. "Did you suffer some sort of head wound?"

His attention was flattering, but superfluous. Sam gripped his wrist and pulled it away from her head. "I'm fine, I'm fine."

"Oh." McKay flushed slightly, but his eyes were filled with obvious concern, and his free hand still lingered in her hair. Cautiously, his intent changed from methodical medical concern to something far kinder, and his rigid fingers softened to cup the back of her head. Sam wondered what it said about her emotional state as of late that she wanted to fall back into his warm touch.

"Why not?" he asked in a low voice, and the gentle tone almost made Sam check over her shoulder out the window, to see if they'd passed through some sort of spatial rift and landed in an alternate universe.

She knew what he was asking, but all of the things she could have said were antagonizing in nature. For some reason, she wasn't in the mood to tear him down in the manner to which they were both accustomed. "I don't know," she said helplessly.

McKay stepped back, as though she'd threatened him. "I see," he covered, and bungled his way through a subject change. "You know, I never did thank you for saving my life."

Sam smiled indulgently. "It was a joint effort," she assured him.

"Of course it was," McKay said, puffing up a little out of habit, and Sam's lips curled. "But. You flew." It was obvious he was trying, and she felt a little guilty. McKay, on the other hand, had long displayed his ability for one-track-mindedness, and said, "Humor the dying man, Sam. Why have we never gotten together?"

"You're not dying," she said dismissively. His eyes narrowed at her, and she decided having the conversation then would save her from having it at another, less opportune time. "You act like it's all on my shoulders, but have you ever considered that it's your fault? You're sort of reprehensible."

"Not all the time," he said with an almost childlike pout.

"No, not all the time," she agreed, grinning a little despite herself. "But it does make things difficult. When was the last time you had a girlfriend?"

"Hey, I live in another galaxy. That's pushing 'long distance relationship' a bit." He smirked in an intensely irritating manner. "Is that really the best you've got?"

"It wouldn't work, McKay. We'd kill each other."

"That is crap, Sam. We work fine together. We fight, sure, but what couples don't fight? Besides, that's the tension in 'sexual tension.'"

He made her laugh, that was for certain. Or maybe she really had hit her head. Maybe all of it was an elaborate hallucination, and she was actually losing her mind, because she no longer thought that being trapped on a dead Tel'tak with Rodney McKay was the worst thing in the universe. She wasn't looking forward to getting picked up by the Lucian Alliance, or the life support running out, whichever came first, but for the moment, she was content with her circumstances.

She'd been working far too hard these days, she decided.

"To be in a relationship," she said cautiously, "you have to be willing to sacrifice things, to put other people before yourself and your job."

"I could do that," he defended.

Sam shook her head. "Atlantis needs you, McKay. And besides, what makes you think I was talking about you? I'm just as stubborn, just as obsessed with my job. That's why we work well together; we're alike." She smiled a little. "I'm better with people, though."

The light in his eyes dimmed, but didn't burn out. "Don't you ever wonder, though?" he said. "What could have been?"

Sam had seen enough alternate realities to know a myriad of ways things could have been. "Sometimes," she conceded. Just because she'd never seen a reality with her and McKay didn't mean that one didn't exist. And it would have been interesting to find out what things were like in that world.

He grinned earnestly. "You can't resist me, can you."

"Don't flatter yourself," she said, but she had given up all hope for anything resembling normalcy and was smiling at him. "You have an unusual brand of charm, McKay." She let that half-compliment sink in for a moment before she moved in for the kill: "It's why you've managed to make it this far in life without anyone blowing you up."

"Not that they haven't tried," and she was surprised by the humor interlacing his voice.

"Well, when someone inevitably does pull that trigger," she conceded, knowing he'd read into her statement however he liked, and being okay with that knowledge, "it probably won't be me."

McKay's wall dropped, in the slight relaxation of his shoulders, and his face reddened slightly, with pride or shame, she couldn't determine which. "Sam," he said, stepping closer, his voice dropping low and urgent. "As long as we're baring our souls..." For a moment, she questioned if she'd gone too far. "What are your thoughts on Doctor Who?"

*

The _Odyssey_ arrived three hours after the fact, and Sam thanked God they hadn't run into anything worse. The both of them were too smart to pretend the Tel'tak's system failure alarms weren't, well, alarming. McKay had reluctantly diverted power from the shields to the life support, because what was the point in having the shields in the first place if there was nothing to protect.

They'd bickered horribly for about two hours and thirty-five minutes of their stay. Canadian versus American government, manual DHDs versus those in the jumpers, Goa'uld versus Wraith technology, which of the two of them would be more likely to Ascend. When the topic swung around to sci-fi movies and the level of scientific evidence presented in them, McKay had begged off from a losing argument, citing a need to eat because of his grievous injury.

McKay surprised her. He was wrong about so many things, and unwilling to admit it, which only made the times he was right that much worse. But in between, there were moments where he was surprisingly insightful. He even offered her one of his own protein bars, which nearly killed her, knowing how possessive he tended to be about his food. She debated checking him for head injuries she might have missed, but he was eating his own bar intently, and looked none the worse for wear.

Sam mistook the crackling of her radio as the crinkling of her discarded food wrapper, until a familiar voice filled the small space. "Attention, this is Colonel Paul Emerson of the United States Air Force vessel _Odyssey_. We're looking for two associates of ours, last scene aboard this Tel'tak."

Relief flooded Sam, and she grabbed her radio to answer. "Colonel, it's Sam. I'm here with Dr. McKay. We're fine, we're in one piece."

"Good to hear your voice, Sam. We lost your signal due to some interference." That would have been the asteroid belt. "I'm glad we found you again. Can you ring on board?"

"No can do. We disabled the rings, so you're going to have to scoop us up, if you don't mind."

"Sure thing."

In a flash of light, the two scientists found themselves in the bridge. McKay looked at Sam with nervous affection. "For what it's worth," he said, "this was fun. Well, ah, not 'fun', not in the traditional sense of the word, I mean, with the—"

"McKay," she interrupted. "It was." They smiled at each other tiredly, and as McKay shuffled off to be examined by the med team, Sam knew that she meant it.


End file.
